Background
Valery Polyakov was born on April 27, 1942.
Valery Polyakov was born on April 27, 1942.
In 1959 he was graduated from secondary school No.4 in Tula. On June 25, 1965 he was graduated from the 1st Moscow Medical Institute name after Sechenov and received a doctor's degree, From September 1965 to June 1966 he had been studying at the clinical residency of the Institute of Medical Parasitology and Tropical Medicine named after E.I. Martsinovsky. He left the institute and did not begin to defend his thesis. From October 18, 1971 to October 18, 1974 he studied at the graduate school of the Institute of International Relations of the Ministry of Health of the USSR and on January 30, 1976 he defended his thesis of candidate of medical sciences.
On December 1979 was included in the first (main) crew of the "Soyuz T-3" (Vasily Lazarev, Gennady Strekalov), the test flight of which was planned for the fourth quarter of 1980, together with medical research and experiments. In such a composition, the crew was trained until the end of May 1980, when, due to the need of repairing the thermal control system of the "Salyut-6" station, it was decided to postpone the flight of the "Soyuz T-3" spacecraft to the medical program, and instead send the "Repairmen" crew. From October 3, 1983 to January 30, 1984, he was directly trained for the flight to OK "Salyut-7" under the long-distance cosmonaut doctor program as a part of the second EO-3 crew together with Vladimir Vasyutin and Viktor Savinykh.
On June 1980, the crew (previous first crew: Vasily Lazarev, Gennady Strekalov, Valery Polyakov) was appointed as a duplicate for this new program and began preparations. On October 1980, Gennady Strekalov was transferred to the main crew, replacing Konstantin Feoktistovin who had been suspended for health . Victor Savinykh was appointed to replace him in the backup crew. During the launch of the "Soyuz T-3" spacecraft on November 27, 1980, Valery Polyakov was the understudy of the cosmonaut-explorer of the main crew;
From June to October 1983, was trained for a long flight of the astronaut physician in the group.
From August to November 1987, he took three months' training at the TsKK Air Force named after J.A. Gagarin. Within their framework, from September 10 to October 25, the program of preparation for work in outer space was successfully completed;
From February 15, 1988 to August 17, 1988, was directly trained for the one and a half-year flight of a cosmonaut as the first cosmonaut-researcher of the crew of the expedition to visit EP-Z together with Vladimir Lyakhov and Abdul Momand (Afghanistan);
From January to July 1993 he was trained in the CPC for a half-yearly flight as part of a group of cosmonauts, along with Herman Arzamazov and Boris Morukov;
From July 1 to December 17, 1993, was directly trained for the flight to the Mir space station as part of EO-15, 16, 17 as a cosmonaut-explorer (physician) of the first crew, together with Viktor Afanasyev and Yuri Usachev.